Comment by simne

I wonder, when people will begin read books (or at least learn documentation).

> OpenAI burned more than $5 billion last year.

Well, this is semi-true. When speaking about LLM technology, must be honest, and make difference of base (or foundation) model training, vs fine-tune it for purpose.

Sure, if you just use base model, you also could gain some profit, but real value of LLM achievable if you got already done base model and fine-tune it on your target task.

What this mean - base LLM are just learn language structure from really huge dataset (for example, entire Wikipedia), and this is really expensive, but when you fine-tune LLM from for example, your corporation product documentation, it will become AI-consultant about your corporation. Or you could fine-tune LLM from children story book, and it could indefinitely generate texts similar to that story. BTW, rumors said, some orgs fine-tuned GPT-3 on their company codebase and have very interesting results on code generation (much better than with base model).

Fact, base model training really cost millions (Llama-2 official cost $5 millions, and I believe it much more than claims of Chinese about deepseek R1 cost also $5 millions).

But fine-tune GPT-4o now cost about 20 bucks for 1 million tokens, and inference is $3.75 per million input tokens and $15 per million output tokens. For GPT-4o mini, training cost is $3 per million tokens, and inference is $0.30 per million input tokens and $1.20 per million output tokens (from official announce on OpenAI developer community).

If you consider fine-tuning of GPT-3 class model (or for example, similar open source model), official prices are just few bucks for million tokens (run it on your own infrastructure will be slightly more expensive), which I think very tolerable and already affordable for small companies.

And I admit, just few Billions of market is not scale of big thing, but I think, it is just because conservative corporate tops, and because security problems of current implementations, and will change nearest years.